Who's
there?
Creating
awareness of bodies moving around one's physical space
It's always nice to peek
out the window at night in Talponia, our residence in Ivrea, and
see that there are other people awake with their lights are on.
Similarly, working at the Institute at night, when you know there
are people around and you don't have to walk home alone, it gives
you a sense of safety. What's important is not who exactly is behind
those lights but more to know that there is someone out there.
Initially I thought of making a desktop application which would
display how many people were online and offline in both spaces(Institute
and Talponia). I also thought it could be interesting to show if
there are any visitors or unidentified people in the networks, since
IDII is often entertaining a number of visitors from all around
the world. Spending some time talking with the network administrator
of IDII, Silvio Valentino, I have discovered that it was not possible
to differantiate who was an IDII person and who was a visitor since
people don't have static IP addresses.
My assumption at the beginning was people at IDII were pretty connected
to their computers and carried them from home to school and back,
and kept them on most of the time. I made a survey among IDII people
to test if my assumptions were true and saw that 97% of the people
answering the survey were carrying their computers with them and
70% was keeping it on when they were around the computer.
To code my desktop applicationI used Konfabulator. Konfabulator
is a desktop application development platform for Macintosh and
applications are called widgets. It uses javascript and xml, and
it's very convenient for rapid prototyping.
Mathias
Dahlström wrote an application to ping the network in 1
minute intervals to see how many computers were online and feed
the number to a URL that the application could get the number from.
Application I wrote is getting the number from the URL and displaying
that many squares on the screen. Images are color-coded; blue for
Bluhaus and green for Talponia. My widget is an ambient display
that rests on your desktop and shows you the amount of people in
both places without disturbing your normal computer activity.
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